Voices for Freedom

We offer the first corpus linguistics approach to slave narratives and slavery discourse, working with data from NGOs, social media, data generated through the Rights Lab itself, and industry data from recent disclosure legislation.

In our first strand, Record and Represent, we combine research on corpus linguistics and privacy preserving search to understand how language data generated by vulnerable groups in society can be collected and processed in a manner that preserves the privacy of the individuals who create it.

In our second strand, Fractured Identities, we use innovative, cutting-edge approaches from sociolinguistics to establish shifting patterns of identity as individuals tell narratives of their time enslaved. This analysis will enable policy makers and other key stakeholders to gain direct access to the experiences of those who have been enslaved in their own voices. We are further using corpus linguistics to examine large quantities of media language, in order to study the representation of slaves by different agencies and link this back to the experiences expressed by slaves themselves.

Theme

Contributor

Projects

Our transdisciplinary projects answer four main questions: 1. How many slaves exist in the world and where are they? 2. Why does slavery exist and persist? 3. What works to end it? 4. What difference does freedom make?

The 16 projects all intersect and form an ambitious platform of transdisciplinary interventions that can be scaled up as the international community works towards slavery’s eradication by 2030.